Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Inquiry: Transaction Tiering

From: praxeology_guy <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2017 03:02:35 -0400

Martin:

Re: Block Space Authority, or "authority": in general

An authority dictates policy.

Authority arises in 4 cases off the top of my head:
- Authority because entity threats violence/dominance
- Authority because entity's claim to property is respected to maintain friendship/benefits of specialization and trade. (one has authority over one's own property/business/contractually agreed claims)
- Authority because entity claims divine inspiration, and others accept such a claim
- Authority because entity gained respect and was voluntarily delegated

"Miners" do not fit in any of these categories. In fact "miners" do the exact opposite, their policy is dictated by market demand. They do us the service of creating block candidates. If a miner is a good businessman, he mines whatever currency gives him the most profit. The end users decide the policy and which currency is worth anything. Hence the users are the ones dictating to the miners how much work they should perform on each coin.

Miners compete against each other until there is only very slim profit. If they are devoting too much work to a coin they spend too much on energy/computers/network, and they have losses, so they reduce capacity on that coin. If mining a coin is extremely profitable, they expand their work until there is no profit.

So... miners don't really have any authority. Or if for some reason somebody does give them authority, its due to either the Divine (lol unlikely) or Respect reasons above... which is an unfounded/insecure reason.

Using miner signalling to determine when/whether SegWit is activated was a mistake in any extent that gave people the implication that miners have any authority. It was a poor way to schedule its activation. We assumed that the miners would activate it in a reasonable time because SegWit is undeniably good, so we just used this method to try to prevent a soft fork. Instead I recommend my proposed BitcoinUpdateBoard https://pastebin.com/ikBGPVfR. Or bitcoin core could include more entities such as specific miners and exchanges in their table located here: https://bitcoincore.org/en/segwit_adoption/.

We already have come to consensus that SegWit is good. So we should just schedule a date to activate it in the future where market participants have a reasonable time to prepare.

Cheers,
Praxeology Guy